Frequently Asked Questions

88. Who is an employee and who is a student at the university?

There are three different major types of active identity categories at the university - students, employees and other active (övrigt verksamma).

• A student is always a private individual and cannot act as part of the university authority (myndighet).
• An employee is always a part of the university authority.
• An other active is a person where the head of department (or similar) take responsibility for that the other active acts in the same way as an employee.

Persons who are students but are also working on behalf of the department should not use their Student ID but an Employee ID instead. This way the private use is separated from the use as an university employee or other active.

Persons using an Employee ID can via the catalogue get group embership controlling access to shared electronic resources belonging to the research group (file server shares, high-performance computing clusters) and other electronic resources at the university.

So why should a person use the role as an other active rather than a student?

1. The research group leader can give the person group membership access to the shared electronic resources for the research group.
2. The research group leader control start and stop date for the person getting acccess to the shared electronic resources.
3. The responsibilites are clearly divided between technical access to the resource for the whole group (initially configured by a system administrator) and including the person in the shared resources for that research group (given by the research group leader).
4. There is no additional administration by system administrators to manually provide access. This is done automatically via AKKA through the directory services (Active Directory (USER-AD) and LDAP) using groups from the catalogue.
5. No person that has been given access is forgotten since the access is automatically removed.
6. Depending on the computer systems that are used, a person using an employee ID and with group membership (access to shared electonic resources) will automatically get backup of important files (usually on Windows computers this includes Desktop and Documents).
7. If a student (working on behalf of the university using their Employee ID as an other active) later will get employed all data is already at the right place and with correct ownership. Otherwise the data would have to be moved from their old place to the new and change ownership from the old Student ID to the new Employee ID.

Please read more:

• The concept other active in the university catalogue AKKA (Begreppet verksam i universitetskatalogen AKKA)
• Electronic identities in AKKA at Uppsala University (Elektroniska identiteter i AKKA vid Uppsala universitet).

This entry student.vs.employee was last modified 2017-10-23

This documentation is covered by GNU Free Documentation License.